Necessary Trouble

One of the things I don't feel I'm hearing in the tributes to Representative John Lewis, who died yesterday of pancreatic cancer, at the age of 80, is his role as the spiritual heir of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as the apostle of nonviolence.*

Not just a spiritual discipline but an effective weapon for change, of course, for which the training was practically military (as he explained in this interview with Krista Tippett)

And we had a teacher by the name of Jim Lawson, a young man who taught us the philosophy and the discipline of nonviolence. We studied. We studied what Gandhi attempted to do in South Africa, what he accomplished in India. We studied Thoreau and civil disobedience. We studied the great religions of the world. And before we even discussed a possibility of a sit-in, we had role-playing. We had what we called “social drama.”

And we would act out. There would be black and white young people, students, an interracial group, playing the roles of African Americans, or an interracial group playing the roles of white. And we went through the motion of someone harassing you, calling you out of your name, pulling you out of your seat, pulling your chair from under you, someone kicking you or pretending to spit on you. Sometimes we did pour cold water on someone — never hot — but we went through the motion.

But at bottom, the way of love:

First of all, you have to grow. It’s just not something that is natural. You have to be taught the way of peace, the way of love, the way of nonviolence. And in the religious sense, in the moral sense, you can say in the bosom of every human being, there is a spark of the divine. So you don’t have a right as a human to abuse that spark of the divine in your fellow human being.

We, from time to time, would discuss if you see someone attacking you, beating you, spitting on you, you have to think of that person — years ago, that person was an innocent child, innocent little baby. And so what happened? Something go wrong? Did the environment? Did someone teach that person to hate, to abuse others? So you try to appeal to the goodness of every human being. And you don’t give up. You never give up on anyone.

And it strikes me that right now, in the wake of the police murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd and in the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic, is a particularly fraught and thrilling moment in the history of nonviolence, as we see the movement under the tutelage of Black Lives Matter coming so close to succeeding through nonviolence (after a start marred at the fringes with some window-smashing bad behavior) in working a genuine reform in policing in the United States.

It's clear that the forces of reaction—like the forces around Trump—sense it as a danger, though they may not understand it at all clearly. This would be the reason for Department of Homeland Security sending its goons to Portland, in the hope of starting fights (if "antifa" entirely exists anywhere, it's there), harassing peaceful demonstrators, picking them up for nothing and releasing him, creating the most hostile climate they can. Josh Marshall writes:

there is no breakdown of order or the rule of law that remotely merits deploying federal law enforcement. We’re talking mainly about graffiti and a small subset of protestors throwing bottles. Most importantly, state and city authorities have explicitly asked them to leave. They’ve argued, convincingly, that the presence of federal law enforcement, especially in such an aggressive and militarized posture, is inflaming rather than calming the situation.

Indeed, that seems precisely the intention.

What we have here is a kind of violent Trumpist cosplay, attempting to play out and foment the kind of ‘law and order’ confrontations that are at the heart of the President’s reelection message and view of American society itself.

Eyes on the prize, everyone! Don't let these thugs distract you!

*One exception is Joe Biden, whose statement brings it out right at the beginning:

How could someone in flesh and blood be so courageous, so full of hope and love in the face of so much hate, violence, and vengeance? Perhaps it was the Spirit that found John as a young boy in the Deep South dreaming of preaching the social gospel; the work ethic his sharecropper parents instilled in him and that stayed with him; the convictions of nonviolent civil disobedience he mastered from Dr. King and countless fearless leaders in the movement; or the abiding connection with the constituents of Georgia’s 5th District he loyally served for decades.